Sunday, May 15, 2016

David Hume, Republicanism, and the Human Scale of Political Order

 Hume 2

Aristotle taught that “To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements, for none of these things retain their natural power when they are too large or too small.”1 In this paper I want to explore Hume’s views on the proper size and scale of political order.

Size and scale are not the same thing. The scale of a thing is the size appropriate to its function. Scale for human things is the human body and its capacities. Classical architects have longed explored the relation between the human frame, its sensory capacities, and the proper size of doors, windows, courtyards, gardens, the width of streets, plazas, and so forth.

What is the proper size and scale of political order? The answer depends on what we think the function of political order is. Plato and Aristotle thought the function of political association is to achieve human excellence. Since virtue is acquired through emulation of character, face to face knowledge is required of political participants, and this places a limit on the size of the polity.

Aristotle said it should contain “the largest number which suffices for the conduct of life, and can be taken in at a single view.”2 Another classical measure was that one should be able to walk across the polity in a single day. The ancient Greek republics were of this human size and scale.


‘The sword of Muhammad, and the Koran, are the most fatal enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth.'

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Mike Scruggs

In 1993, Harvard Professor of Political Science Samuel P. Huntington published an article in Foreign Affairs, based on his 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, entitled “A Clash of Civilizations.” In 1996, he published his expanded thesis in a bestselling book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Unfortunately, the political classes in the United States and Europe paid little attention to his work and thesis. The need for cheap oil, the lust for cheap-labor profits, and the emerging dominance of multiculturalist philosophies and rabid forms of diversity-engineering and political correctness blinded Europe and America to the true nature of Islam that had been much better understood by previous generations of cultural and political leadership.

Islam can only be defined by its sacred doctrinal standards—the Koran and the Hadiths (traditions) and Sira (life example) of Muhammad—and measured by its true history. It cannot be redefined according to political correctness standards and whitewashed history no matter how much liberal academic and media blather and Muslim Brotherhood bribery attempt to portray Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance. It is basically an aggressive totalitarian ideology wrapped around a core mixture of religious borrowings expediently amended by Muhammad and including a number of heretical Jewish and Christian tales. In the not too distant past, Western religious and political leaders had a firmer grasp on the truth than the fairytale version of Islam that now endangers the U.S., Canada, and much of Europe. In a 2004 raid on a Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Virginia, the FBI uncovered a strategic plan to deceive American leaders on the nature of Islam, destroy American Constitutional government by “Civilization Jihad,” and impose Sharia Law on all.

We are in a Clash of Civilizations and are very near losing it by making immigration a sacred cow, by which ignorant and depraved politicians are pouring millions of Muslim immigrants into the West with little thought or conscience regarding their belief and commitment to the Islamic doctrines of Supremacy, Sharia Law, Jihad (Holy War against all non-Muslims), and their likely catastrophic consequences. Increased terrorism is but a small but certain part of the risk. The sacred doctrines of Islam call for its religious and political dominance in every nation. Relentless deception and agitation leading to violent Jihad and the overthrow of all competing religious, government, and judicial systems are obligatory to the faithful followers of Muhammad. Islamic Law (Sharia) embraces every facet of Muslim life and the lives of non-Muslims who come under its dominion. We have also foolishly extended the meaning of religious liberty to absurd politically correct levels endangering millions of lives and the religious freedoms of everybody but Muslims. We must not take leave of our senses to accommodate sacred cows or unrealistic social expectations.

Here are just a few of the warnings left to us by revered leaders of the past.

Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Church, born 1927. Pope 2005-2013.

“Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything…There is a very marked subordination of woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.”

Edward Gibbon, English historian (1737-1794), author of: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

“Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Muhammad; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim, that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage.”

Sir William Muir, Scottish historian, scholar, and translator of Middle Eastern languages. (1819-1905).

‘The sword of Muhammad, and the Koran, are the most fatal enemies of Civilization, Liberty, and Truth, which the world has yet known. Some, indeed, dream of an Islam in the future, rationalized and regenerate. All this has been tried already, and has miserably failed. The Koran has so encrusted the religion in a hard unyielding casement of ordinances and social laws, that if the shell be broken the life is gone. A rationalistic Islam would be Islam no longer. The contrast between our own faith and Islam is most remarkable. There are in our Scriptures living germs of truth, which accord with civil and religious liberty, and will expand with advancing civilization. In Islam it is just the reverse. The Koran has no such teaching as with us has abolished polygamy, slavery, and arbitrary divorce, and has elevated woman to her proper place.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) was the 26th President of the United States (1901 – 1909)

“Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Muslims were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, an on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor... The civilization of Europe, America and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization, because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel in the eighth century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Muslim conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today, nobody can find in them any "social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influences are concerned. There are such "social values" today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do — that is, to beat back the Muslim invader.”

President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) simply said, “The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Muhammad is the prophet of God.”  John Calvin (1509-1564), a French theologian highly influential in the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the religious and political philosophies of American colonists including the “founding fathers,” said that Islam “substituted an idol for the true God.” Methodist founder John Wesley (1703-1791) spoke of Muslim rage, fury, and revenge and called them “destroyers of mankind.” America’s most renowned theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), thought there was a possible connection of Muhammad and Islam to Revelation 16:13-14 concerning the end times.

Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is concerned about Muslim immigration and wants a temporary halt to it. Democrat Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton is calling for open-door immigration and more Muslim immigration in particular. The Clintons and the Clinton Foundation have received substantial millions in donations from Muslim governments. But where do our Congressional candidates stand on Muslim immigration? As usual, most are avoiding the issue.  Congressional issue avoidance could prove fatal to our liberties.

War Profiteering in the North

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Published as a textbook well before America’s cultural revolution of the 1960’s, John Hicks “The Federal Union” can be trusted as a fairly accurate source of United States history and free of cultural Marxist revisionism. Below, he touches on the North’s generous government supply contracts, child labor and general wartime prosperity while its bounty-enriched blue-clad soldiers devastated Americans in the South to preserve a territorial Union.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

War Profiteering in the North

“When the Civil War broke out the North had not fully recovered from the depression that had followed the panic of 1857, and for a time business interests were more frightened than stimulated by the clash of arms. By the summer of 1862, however, a surge of prosperity had put in its appearance that was to outlast the war.

With millions of men under arms the [Northern] government was a dependable and generous purchaser of every kind of foodstuff, and its equally great need of woolen goods and leather strengthened the market also for raw wool and hides. Probably the sales of the farmers made directly or indirectly to the government more than offset the losses sustained by wartime interference with sales to the South.

[And] with the South out of the Union, a homestead law, so long the goal of believers in free land, was speedily enacted (1862). Thereafter any person who was head of a family, or had arrived at the age of twenty-one years, whether a citizen of the united States or an alien who had declared his intention of becoming a citizen, might take up a quarter section of public land, and, after having lived upon it for five years and improved it, might receive full title to it virtually free of charge.

What came in later years to be called “heavy industries” profited enormously from the war. Purchases of munitions abroad practically ceased after the first year because of the rapidity with which American factories supplied the government’s needs . . . the government itself went deeply into the business of manufacturing war materials as public opinion would permit.

High tariffs ensured the northern manufacturers against the dangers of foreign competition. A protectionist policy had been demanded by the Republican national platform of 1860, and a higher schedule of tariffs . . . was placed upon the statute books two days before [President James] Buchanan left office. This speedy answer to the prayers of the protectionists was made possible by the withdrawal from Congress of the delegations from the seven seceding States of the lower South, and by the fact that President Buchanan was no longer unmindful of the wishes of the manufacturers of his home State [of Pennsylvania].

The original Morrill Tariff Act was repeatedly revised upward during the war, until by 1864 the average of duties levied on imports had reached forty-seven per cent, the highest thus far in the history of the nation. The significance of this development can scarcely be overemphasized. A policy which the South had persistently blocked in the years preceding the war became an actuality during it, and as subsequent events were to prove, remained as a permanent fixture in American political and economic life.

The profits of war bred a spirit of extravagance and frivolity among the non-combatants of the north that contrasted oddly with the long casualty lists displayed as a regular part of the daily news. Social life reached a dizzying whirl, with more parties and dances, theaters and circuses, minstrel shows and musicales than ever had been known before.

According to a statement published by the Springfield Republican in 1864, many of the factories whose profits during the war had been “augmented beyond the wildest dreams of their owners” paid their laborers only from twelve to twenty per cent more than before the war. “There is absolute want in many families, while thousands of young children who should be in school are shut up at work that they may earn something to eke out the scant supplies at home.”

(The Federal Union, A History of the United States to 1865, John D. Hicks, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948, pp. 660-665)

Where does loyalty belong?

Via David

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VERBATIM

I am from the school of loyalty belonging in God, family, country, in that order. When it comes to voting, my loyalty does not belong to any individual or political party. My vote belongs to me. And, I have an obligation to behave responsibly and sensibly with my vote.

In that vein, whether I am a lifelong Republican or conservative is important, but only in so far as my deeply held beliefs are furthered or protected. Many Republicans or conservatives are disaffected or in pique by the apparent triumph of Donald Trump. However, for me, Trump does not get my vote because I am a Republican or conservative but because the alternatives are far worse in a continuation of the Democrats' ongoing literal destruction of our ethics, our economy, and our national security, while in actuality doing relatively less to upraise the unfortunate than to tie them into being lackeys of the central government instead of their own initiative, compounded by our citizen poor being undercut by uncontrolled inflows of foreign competitors for jobs and public funds. To not vote is to vote for the continuation of the past 8-years of the outright assault on the very fiber of the United States.

I cannot accept with any respect any Republicans or conservatives who will now support Hillary Clinton.  They do not deserve it. They exhibit themselves as rent-seekers, to profit from her probable election to the presidency due to the lock that Democrats have on a near majority of the electoral college. Or, they exhibit their overriding loyalty to their liberal social circle in New York or Washington. They do not exhibit the judgment to choose the lesser of evils, and they increase the probability of loss of Republican control of the Senate and House, which only increases the damages from a leftist administration. 

Piedmont Blues: North Carolina Style (2013) Documental

Tarboro @ 10:00
 

Obama Slams Trump Wall at Rutgers Commencement …As White House Raises Its Fence

Via Billy

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Obama went after Donald Trump — in a commencement speech — at Rutgers.

Obama told the students building walls won’t improve things.

(He must have not noticed the White House was raising its fence.)

The Collapsing Left South Of The Border.


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Via comment by JWMJR on "Socialism Is Dying Everywhere from Europe to South...":

Fully engaged as we are in our own tumultuous political season, the growing chaos in Latin America is getting little attention in most American media outlets, particularly those on the ideological left. I have no doubt that they see it all just to embarrassing to their own undisguised political bias.

Although some outlets have recently brought themselves, however grudgingly, to finally declare that the "Bolivarian Socialism" of Venezuela has indeed failed, you won't find much in-depth analysis of the causes of the failure, namely that socialism itself breeds the corruption that destroys the nations where it takes root. Completely absent will be any perspectives that the emerging human tragedy in Venezuela, the political crisis in Brazil, the just announced indictment of the former Argentine President for corruption and the various other states of general lack of development, all grow from the root of the same poisonous tree, collectivist socialism.

Call it what you will, Bolivarian Socialism, Peronism, Jesuitical egalitarianism or just plain old naked communism. They all stagnate at best or utterly fail because of the belief in the corrupt notion that government must provide "positive rights" as opposed guaranteeing "negative rights".

NY Times Hit Piece: Trump Gave Them Names of Women He Helped – But They Ignored His List

Via Billy

trump women

77The New York Times released its latest hit piece on Donald Trump today.

The Times interviewed Trump but did not use any of the names of women he has helped over the years.

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They didn’t want fairness.

They wanted a hit piece.


Today GOP Chairman Reince Priebus discussed the hit piece on ABC.

He called it a “classic Clinton operation.”

You See Me Laughin': the last of the hill country bluesmen (Mississippi Blues documentary - 2002)

Via Dick

Re-post
 

The Chesterton Axiom No Longer Applies

Via David

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When I did my baconalicious koran burning five years ago, in an interview a few days afterward I was asked the following question:
IOTW –  In your video you pretty much dare Muslims to come and get you. Are you being a martyr, or do you pretty much have confidence that you can handle yourself?
Ann – Were the guys who volunteered to fight in all previous wars “martyrs”€?  Did the boys who enlisted in ’41 have a death wish?  No.  There just comes a point where any person of integrity knows that they have to fight.  I love G.K. Chesterton’s quote, “A true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”  I love my country and my fellow man enough to be willing to lay down my life to defend them against evil.  And, yeah.  I can damn sure handle not only myself, but also an assault rifle, a big ass tactical shotgun, a sniper rifle, and a nine for those “intimate” encounters.

I no longer love what is behind me.  I have zero desire to fight for or in any way contribute to the continuance of what used to be called “The United States.”  Burn it.  Burn it to the ground. (Seems like I've said this before)

What brought this post on?

More @ Barnhardt

Tom Brokaw at Ole Miss: 'If I were speaking at Alabama, I would have to use smaller words'

Via Jeffery

Tom Brokaw
Colossal asshole.
 
Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw slammed the University of Alabama while giving the commencement address at the University of Mississippi on Saturday morning.

"I'm so relieved to be speaking to a graduating class from Ole Miss," the legendary journalist said. "If I were speaking at Alabama, I would have to use smaller words and shorter sentences."

What do you think of Brokaw's remarks?

More @ AL

WESTERN VALUES HEADING TOWARD OBLIVION

Via David"The systematic and deliberate destruction of Western values.  Quote: "What do you call a city when the host culture and her people are fleeing the vibrant enrichment that their politicians are telling them is so desirable?
The deliberate, intentional undoing of thousands of years of development - to create that which cannot be: a Marxist utopia founded on the delusion that human nature can be rewritten by diktat.  This is treason of the highest order."

SALLY MILLER: Hillary and her ‘coke habit’

Via Jeffery



Like other men I’ve known, Bill Clinton fantasized about having a covey of females, all with full breasts, shapely long legs, and tight, eager vaginas in bed with him.

After watching his bed-mates kiss and fondle each other for a while, then he’d join the action.
When I asked Bill if he shared his fantasies with Hillary, he laughed.

“What a joke! Sex is a waste of time to Hillary. When we were dating, she talked about making-out with her girlfriends in college because she knew it turned me on. Hillary seemed worldly and more sexually-experienced than me and, at the time, I liked it.”

“Before we married, I got her pregnant and she had an abortion. It bothered me because I didn’t know about it until it was over. Then, several months after the wedding, she slipped up again because she was too lazy to take the pill.

“Hillary hates kids. She was one nasty bitch when she was pregnant. My God, for nine months, she made my life a living hell and blamed me!

“From the beginning, our political advisors warned us that Hillary must take my last name and concentrate on having a child if I was going to have a future in politics. I saw the real Hillary after we got married.

Socialism Is Dying Everywhere from Europe to South America – Except in the US

Via Billy

The face of socialism in the U.S. is grandfatherly Bernie Sanders. But the real face should be Venezuela's late socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, whose socialist policies have led to misery, chaos and death. (AP)

Socialism: Around the world, nations that have been foolish enough to adopt socialist policies either collapsed or are well on their way to doing so. Why, then, are so many in the U.S. enthralled with the idea?

A quick look at the world’s countries in direst economic shape reveals that many, if not most, have one thing in common: They rely on top-down socialist control, rather than free markets, to run their economies. The former, history amply shows, are doomed to fail. There are no long-term socialist success stories. None.